Main Streets of Oklahoma, The: Okie Stories from Every County by Eaton Kristi

Author:Eaton, Kristi [Eaton, Kristi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Lincoln County

Rock Café

114 West Main Street, Stroud

I didn’t know anything about Route 66 or how to cook. There were so many things I didn’t know .

—Dawn Welch, owner of the Rock Café and inspiration for the character Sally in the Disney film Cars

Tourists journeying along Route 66 in Oklahoma have been stopping at the Rock Café on Stroud’s Main Street for more than seventy years, but it’s only been in the past two decades that the restaurant has become a cultural icon for the famed highway’s resurgence and its owner an inspiration for the character Sally in the Pixar animated film Cars .

Dawn Welch never thought she would end up in Stroud, a city of about 2,700 people located in eastern Lincoln County. Welch, who grew up seventy miles away in Yukon, was working for a cruise line and was planning to head to Costa Rica and open up a café when she returned to Oklahoma with plans to sell some property she’d recently inherited.

No sooner did she arrive than she learned about the café, a sandstone building that was built in the 1930s by Roy Rives. Shut down for several years before Welch’s arrival, the café had become a symbol of Route 66’s decay. “It had a very bad reputation, and everybody in town told me there was no way I could possibly rebuild that reputation,” she said.

But Welch decided to give it a try. At age twenty-four, she decided to reopen the restaurant, initially for one year. She rented the building for $200 per month from the previous owner and went about learning all she could about the community—a tip she learned in a book she purchased about running a restaurant.

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